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No Truth, No Justice

Eleven years ago, novelist and screenwriter John Ridley
(best known then for Three Kings, now
for 12 Years a Slave) teamed up with
comics artist Georges Jeanty (best known for his work on the Buffy comics) to produce The American Way, a limited series about
government-created superheroes in the Kennedy era. This summer they returned
with The American Way: Those Above and
Those Below, a sequel that revisits some of the same characters ten years
later to capture them in a time of social and political upheaval. But if the
intervening years haven’t been kind to the heroes, the same cannot be said of
the comics: Those Above and Those Below
is superior to its predecessor in just about every way possible.

When The American Way
was published in 2006, its criticisms of liberal hubris seemed fair but not
especially timely; of all the problems America faced in the waning years of the
Bush administration, the arrogance of Kennedy’s “best and brightest” wasn’t high on the
list. Similarly, its criticisms of the superhero genre—the bold revelation that
its superheroes were all frauds created for government propaganda—felt about
twenty years out of date.

The American Way:
Those Above and Those Below feels a lot more contemporary. Set in 1972, it conjures
a world of incendiary racial tensions, conservative backlash, and terrorist
violence that looks all too familiar. Ridley has said that his story “predates any specific politics we’re going through right now,” but it’s impossible not
to read this series without seeing the grim parallels with our present
situation. (Ridley leans into these parallels: one character rails against
“multiculturalism,” a word that would have barely been in existence in 1972.)
This is all to the good, lending Those
Above and Those Below an urgency its predecessor lacked.

The series traces the lives of three of the suriviving
superheroes from the previous series. Amber Eaton (formerly Amber Waves) has
joined a Weather Underground-style radical group that’s falling deeper and
deeper into political violence. Missy Deveraux (formerly Ole Miss) is running
for governor of Mississippi on a George Wallace-style platform built around the
Confederate flag. And Jason Fisher (formerly the New American, the first black
superhero) is caught somewhere in the middle, trying to uphold a law that views
him as a threat and protect a community that increasingly regards him as a
sellout.

A typical page from The American Way (2006)

In The American Way,
Ridley and Jeanty committed themselves to no less than fifteen superhumans,
plus their supporting cast, leaving no room to develop any of the characters
in depth. The series was so overcrowded it didn’t even introduce Jason until the second issue. Fortunately, Ridley and Jeanty pull back
significantly in Those Above and Those
Below. The latest issue has begun to reintroduce other characters from the
previous series (one of whom, strangely enough, seems to be a different race or
ethnicity now) but the creators wisely keep the focus on their leads, adding
new layers instead of new players.

Ridley has also become much more confident as a comics writer.
The American Way was glutted with
text, a telltale sign of a novice scripter who burdened his artist with
unnecessary exposition. Those Above and
Those Below is much more terse, communicating its character beats with an
economy of words while giving Jeanty the space to establish the setting and
block out the action. The story is no less rich for its smaller cast and more
restrained script. Just the opposite, the extra breathing room allows for much
more careful delineation of the characters and the society they inhabit.

A typical page from The American Way: Those Above and Those Below (2017)

The same applies to the social commentary. Those Above and Those Below criticizes
the entire political spectrum of the early 70s (and, implicitly, the present)
from militant separatists to angry reactionaries, but it never falls into the cheap
nihilism that marks the opening pages of Doomsday Clock. That’s because Ridley’s criticisms are always grounded in the
particularities of his characters, and he approaches them with a wide-ranging
empathy. All of his characters are trying to do what they think is right, but
Ridley holds no illusions that this makes them all equally right or wrong. The
most sympathetic is probably Jason, a defender of social norms that
nobody around him seems to hold anymore. But even this portrayal is rich with irony:
the hero who was most critical of the previous series’ liberal bureaucrats is
now almost the only one left who’s fighting to protect a liberal-democratic
society ruled by laws rather than force and fear.

It was also an inspired choice to make the Wallace-style
candidate Missy Deveraux, and not simply because “Ole Miss” was steeped in the
imagery and traditions of the old South. Missy was one of the most
conscientious and least racist members of the “Southern Defense Corps” in the
last series, but her participation in a reactionary neo-Confederate
campaign—the slogan is literally “Heritage, Not Hate”—serves as a reminder that
racism isn’t just the province of cackling supervillains (which was too often
how the old series leaned). Those Above
and Those Below approaches racism as a set of institutions as well as
beliefs, and reminds us that even nice, polite people can be invested in them.
As Missy’s example should make clear, Ridley’s empathy for his characters
doesn’t dilute his own staunchly anti-racist views; it sharpens them by allowing
him to form much more subtle insights into the characters and viewpoints he
opposes.

The American Way:
Those Above and Those Below was a long time coming, but it’s well worth the
wait. An improvement in every way over its predecessor, this is a sharp and uncompromising series as well as a timely one.

The American Way (2006) is available now in trade paperback from Vertigo. The American Way: Those Above and Those Below (2017) is currently on the shelves; the fourth issue goes on sale next week.